4 Quotes by Ted Widmer

They had felt their own power and saw in Lincoln the means of delivery from an administration that had brought “treachery, imbecility, and rascality” into their lives. It was time to rescue the republic from “the anarchy which has disgraced this great people in the eyes of the whole world.”121.

The lessons of history were hard to ignore. Every democracy ever known had failed, beginning with the Greeks twenty-four centuries earlier. They had succumbed, one by one, to all the well-known vices of the people: corruption, greed, lust, ethnic hatred, distractibility, or simply a fatal indifference.

What if all the difficulties anticipated in the Federalist Papers – regional tensions, unscrupulous leaders, and a dysfunctional Congress – happened at precisely the same moment?

It was difficult to know which part of the government would ignite first. The Supreme Court had plenty of dry kindling: most of its justices were old men born in the previous century. Congress was eternally bickering. And no executive had ever underperformed quite as spectacularly as James Buchanan.